China 2026

The route

Travel essentials

Three weeks in July and August 2026 with my brother, my first time in Asia. This is peak summer heat and Chinese school holiday season, so many locals travel inside their own country, although China is not yet a heavily touristic destination for foreigners. Generally, you do not have to be afraid of visiting China, also as a woman: it is one of the safest countries in the world, and on average safer than Europe.

You should plan for continental distances. Getting from one city to the next is closer to crossing Europe than to crossing a country, so the travel days need real space in the itinerary. We started with the overnight train from Beijing to Xi’an and continued with high-speed trains for most of the rest of the route.

Visa. As an Austrian you do not need one. China currently has a visa-free policy for stays of up to 30 days for a number of European passports, Austria included. Double-check that it is still active before you book, since these policies are renewed and adjusted on short notice.

Mobile internet and the firewall. The preparation that really mattered was mobile internet, a VPN, the Chinese payment apps, and translation, since you will not get by with English and most people you meet will not speak or understand any. Do all of this before you land, especially the mobile internet. I cannot imagine sorting it out once you are already in the country. The reason is the Great Firewall, arguably more impressive than the actual Great Wall. It blocks the usual suspects like Instagram, Google, and Google Maps. Apple Maps, however, works fine and is allowed. Do not let this scare you off. China wants tourists, so in practice it is less strict than it sounds. As long as you are not doing anything illegal, a VPN or the right mobile data routing gets you to WhatsApp and Instagram without problems.

We bought eSIM plans from Airalo. They work, although a bit slowly, and complaining in their in-app chatbot support seemed to help. These plans route your data through Hong Kong or Taiwan, which sidesteps the Great Firewall entirely. This sounds odd, but again, China wants your tourist money, so the workaround is basically tolerated.

Payments. Link your debit or credit card to Alipay (I used only this one) and make sure that WeChat Pay accepts foreign cards too. I had some problems here and had to call my European bank in the first few days, which was annoying and entirely avoidable if you set it up before you fly.

Apps and getting around. Alipay and WeChat are so-called “super apps,” a concept that barely exists in the West. Inside one app you get a whole ecosystem of smaller apps, all connected to each other. For hotels and trains we used Trip.com, which worked without problems throughout the trip. For getting around, apart from the subways, we relied heavily on Didi, the Chinese version of Uber. It is available everywhere, cheap, and you can even book a private car for distances up to 200 km for surprisingly little money. One catch: I could not use the Didi mini-app inside Alipay and had to install the standalone Didi app instead. This happens with a few services whose full version is tied to a Chinese passport or ID, so foreigners sometimes have to use the separate app.

Personal thoughts, experiences and research

About Chinese culture I could probably write a whole book. What I was really curious about was how people actually live: what locals think about their government, how this compares to the West, how much they actually know, whether this knowledge is biased, and how much censorship shapes it. And the bigger question: can they keep up the economic progress of the last 70 years?

What struck me most was that it felt like landing on another planet. A different language and a different script, a different payment system, people looking and behaving quite differently. It reminded me of something obvious but easy to forget: there are around 8.3 billion people on this planet, and “the West” makes up only roughly 1 billion of them. We should probably pay a lot more attention to Asia: China, Japan, India, and the rest. China alone is roughly the size of the US or of Europe, with two to three times their population, all under a single government. This is an enormous workforce, but it also means that they must be doing something right to keep a population of this size pulling in one direction. I honestly cannot imagine this happening in Europe.

How do people live?

The first things you notice are the superficial ones. People spit, fart, and burp (“rülpsen,” as we say in German) fairly openly, so do not be surprised. Their cuisine, on the other hand, was not really something I enjoyed. People tend to eat the same kind of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, usually very spicy and heavy on meat. Furthermore, they eat every part of an animal, a habit that comes straight from their recent history of poverty, when nothing from a farm animal could go to waste. What I can genuinely recommend as an experience is hot pot in Chongqing, and dim sum in any coastal city like Guangzhou or Shenzhen.

This poverty is more recent than it looks from the outside. Eighty years ago the country was destitute, and what they have achieved on average, across their entire population, over just the last few decades is dramatic. In the cities, people now live almost as they do in the West, in some respects even more advanced. With this history in mind, however, they still seem to care less about a single individual life than Europeans typically do. This may sound harsh, but it is a pattern you see in most countries that have only recently come out of severe poverty.

The same history shows up in how people treat their own time. Work comes first, and free time or leisure for its own sake does not get much thought. We met one Didi driver who runs his own small company and drives on weekends too. He works all day, every day. For him, the extra money for his family clearly outweighs the value of time spent on himself.

Do they simply work harder?

This driver is the anecdotal version of a thesis I wanted to test: that China is catching up simply because people there work harder. The hours support it. A Chinese worker works something like 2,000 to 2,100 hours a year, compared with roughly 1,800 in the US and 1,450 in Austria. So the raw effort is real.

However, hours are only half of the equation. The other half is how much value is produced in each of those hours, and there the picture turns around completely. Measured per hour worked, China produces roughly a fifth of what the US or Austria produces. Austria works the fewest hours of the three and still produces about five times as much per hour as China. This is where the popular version of the story goes wrong, because it mixes up two different claims. More people working more hours does produce a bigger economy in total, and China’s total output is genuinely enormous. But this comes from having 1.4 billion people, not from an individual Chinese worker outperforming an Austrian one. Being big and being efficient are two different things, and working harder only explains the first one. The famous 996 culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) actually supports this point: compensating low output per hour with more hours is exactly what a low-productivity economy looks like.

The obvious next explanation is that China is simply catching up, as postwar Germany and Japan did, where a poor country grows fast because there is so much easy ground to make up. This is part of it, but it is too simple, because it does not explain why China is not catching up at all in a handful of sectors. There it is already ahead. In EVs, batteries, smartphones, and drones, China is not closing a gap. Everyone else is.

The contradiction resolves once you see that China is not one economy, but two stacked on top of each other. Somewhere between 300 and 400 million people still work in agriculture, informal services, or as migrant workers, made precarious by the hukou system. The hukou ties your access to schooling, healthcare, and housing to the place where you were registered at birth, not to where you actually live and work. This mass of people drags the national average down to a fifth of Austria’s. Right next to it are companies like BYD, CATL, DJI, and Huawei, which are as productive as anything in the world in their particular niches. Both facts are true at once, which is why any single number about “China” tends to mislead.

Why do exactly these sectors run so far ahead? A few things seem to compound:

1. They leapfrogged instead of transitioning: there was no legacy combustion-engine industry to protect, which is exactly the sunk cost the German car industry is struggling with right now.
2. The supply chain in the Pearl River Delta is so dense that building a hardware prototype takes days instead of months. This is a physical advantage that no amount of capital elsewhere can replicate quickly.
3. Firms like BYD integrate vertically, down to their own batteries and chips, and earn a margin at every step.
4. The real labour advantage is not cheap workers but cheap engineers, available in large numbers.
5. The domestic market works as a brutal filter. Something like 100 EV brands compete against each other before the survivors are exported.
6. The state takes over the risk of the capital-intensive early phase through subsidies and cheap credit, so companies can lose money for years without dying.

Hong Kong, Macau, and the Taiwan question

We also visited Hong Kong and Macau. Both are so-called Special Administrative Regions, or SARs: former colonies that remain culturally and politically distinct from the mainland. For example, in Hong Kong you can buy books that would get you arrested on the mainland.

I was also curious how Taiwan compares to these two, although it is a fundamentally different case. Taiwan is not an SAR and never has been. In practice it governs itself, officially as the Republic of China, with its own constitution, its own democratically elected president, its own military, and its own legal system. Beijing claims Taiwan as its 23rd province but has no actual control over the island. China originally proposed “one country, two systems,” the same model used for Hong Kong and Macau, as a possible path to unification with Taiwan. Taiwan rejects this outright, and public opinion there has only hardened after watching Beijing erode the autonomy it once promised Hong Kong.